“You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it’s waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Currywurst for Dinner
Happy Birthday, Keren!
Keren Woodward of Bananarama is 48 today! Happy Birthday, Keren!
The Best Luck Ever!
Except for the bitter cold, Wednesday, March 1, 1950, started off like any other day in Beatrice (Bee-AT-riss), Nebraska. Kids went to school, dads went to work, and housewives did their shopping. Everything seemed perfectly normal in this small town of around 10,000 people.
Wednesday was the day that Beatrice’s West Side Baptist Church usually held choir practice. Owing to the piercing cold, pastor Walter Klempel went to the church late that afternoon and lit the furnace so that the sanctuary would be warm by the time practice started at 7:30 that evening. He then went home for dinner, expecting to come back at around 7:15 when choir members usually started showing up.
At 7:25 that night, West Side Baptist Church exploded. The blast was so intense that it blew the sides out of the building, causing the roof to fall straight down. Windows were shattered in many neighboring houses, and the town’s only radio station was temporarily knocked off the air.
Investigators would later determine that the explosion was caused when a gas leak outside the church came in contact with the furnace’s pilot light. But that’s not what makes the “West Side Explosion” so interesting. No, what makes the story so remarkable is that no one was hurt. It might sound like an urban legend, but in this case it’s true… all 15 members of the church choir ran late that night:
– Reverend Klempel normally brought his wife and child to practice. But at 7:10 that night his daughter Marilyn Ruth spilled something on her dress. Mrs. Klempel had to iron another dress, causing the family to run late. They were at home when the blast occurred.
Twitter Updates for 2009-03-30
- Mmmmmmm… Bojangles! #
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Twitter Updates for 2009-03-29
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All About Bookmarklets
Bookmarklets are tiny snippets of JavaScript code that can be stored in a bookmark (or Favorite, if you’re an Internet Explorer user).
Although many bookmarklets can handle tasks that browser extensions or plug-ins can do, bookmarklets have a few added advantages: they’re platform agnostic (most bookmarklets work in all browsers, so if you want to switch from Firefox to Opera most of your bookmarklets will still work); they don’t require any type of installation (Firefox extensions require a browser restart after installation, and also occasionally “break” when a new version of Firefox is released); they use far less memory than even a well-written extension; and lastly, bookmarklets work with bookmark synchronization sites and software, so if you use something like Weave or Foxmarks, you can easily have the same bookmarklets on every browser you use.
So… what can you do with bookmarklets? Check out this quick list I threw together:
Share on Facebook – One of Facebook’s most popular features is the “Share Link” app, which allows you to paste a website address into a Facebook window and send it out to all your friends. To use this feature, you normally have to to copy the target URL to your clipboard, open a new tab and login to Facebook, then paste the URL into the “Share:” box. With this officially-supported bookmarklet, you just go to a web page that you want to share and load the “Share on Facebook” bookmark; this makes a pop-up window appear with all the pertinent sharing information, so you can share it on Facebook with far fewer mouse clicks than the old way.
PressThis! – PressThis is like “Share on Facebook” for WordPress. You can highlight some text on a web page and click the “PressThis!” bookmark… a pop-up window will open to your WP blog with the text you highlighted already added to a new post. It’s awesome! Go to your WP dashboard and click on the main “Tools” menu to find out more.
Legiblize – converts the active web page to a more readable format. Excellent for older web pages or long Wikipedia articles.
Sprint Fail
The missus is looking at new cell phones, so we stopped by our local Sprint store yesterday. Here’s a pic of their automated payment kiosk:
Sorry about the “shaky cam” – the store manager was giving me the stink-eye when I snapped it.
Worst Week Ever!
Talk about your bad luck!
Japan has certified a man aged 93 as the only known survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by atomic bombs towards the end of World War II.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb.
He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city of Nagasaki just before it was bombed on 9 August.
FRIDAY FUN: Pics!
Hey everybody! I just thought I’d post a bunch of funny or interesting pics for a bit of Friday fun!
A few weeks ago, someone posted dozens of high-res historical pictures on \hr\ over at 4chan. One of them was this cool picture of Sting from the early 80s:
(WARNING: this pic is 2417×3670 and is 1.97MB)
- (click to enlarge)
Hard to believe the “Desert Rose” guy was once that cool!